[Though Indian women are leading campaigns to dismantle discriminatory rules on access to religious sites, and courts are ruling in their favor, the grip of tradition is still ironclad in places like the Sabarimala Temple. “In India, the people’s belief is more important than any law,” said Devidas Sethumadhavan, a district officer in Kerala for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist group.]
By Suhasini Raj and Kai Schultz
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Waiting
to gain access to the Sabarimala Temple in the southern Indian state of Kerala
on
Thursday. For centuries, women of childbearing age were prohibited from
entering
the shrine, but the Supreme Court struck down the ban
last
month. Credit Sivaram V/Reuters
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NEAR
SABARIMALA TEMPLE, India —
As a woman and a man climbed a steep trail on Thursday leading to one of
Hinduism’s holiest temples, a mob multiplied with frightening speed.
From a point farther up the path, several
hundred men screamed at the woman, insisting that she immediately turn back
from visiting the Sabarimala Temple, a centuries-old shrine in southern India.
When the pair of visitors, both journalists for The New York Times, decided to
descend, the crowd rushed at them, hurled rocks and pummeled two dozen police
officers.
“Madam, you don’t be afraid, O.K.?” Habeeb
Ullah, one of the police officers, told one of the journalists, a bit too late.
For centuries, women of childbearing age were
prohibited from entering the temple, which is perched on a lush hill in the
coastal state of Kerala. Last month, after India’s Supreme Court struck down
that ban, saying that barring women from the temple infringed on their
constitutional rights, thousands of protesters pledged that women who dared to
visit the temple would be punished.
On Wednesday, when the temple opened for the
first time since the ban was scrapped, it quickly became the latest
battleground in a long-running conflict between India’s modern, liberal court
system and deeply conservative elements of its ancient culture. Protesters,
many of them women, assaulted several journalists, smashed vehicle windshields
and tried to rip a 22-year-old woman who planned to visit the temple from a bus.
“Hooliganism reigns in this place,” the
woman’s father, Manoj, who goes by one name, told the Indian news media. “It’s
almost as if these people view women as terrorists.”
By late Wednesday, the Kerala government had
deployed hundreds of heavily armed police officers near a river bed at the base
of the trek, and dozens of people had been arrested. Manoj Abraham, a police
officer in the area, said, “Every devotee will be allowed safe passage.”
But the dispute is about something much
broader than access to a temple: whether Supreme Court rules can be enforced in
a spectacularly diverse country of 1.3 billion people, where progressive court
orders issued in New Delhi are abstract, or optional, in rural parts of India,
and communities are intensely organized around religion.
Though Indian women are leading campaigns to
dismantle discriminatory rules on access to religious sites, and courts are
ruling in their favor, the grip of tradition is still ironclad in places like
the Sabarimala Temple. “In India, the people’s belief is more important than
any law,” said Devidas Sethumadhavan, a district officer in Kerala for the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist group.
For as long as anybody can remember,
caretakers at the Sabarimala Temple, which hosts millions of pilgrims every
year, have obediently enforced a de facto ban on women and girls who
menstruate, defined by temple officials as those between 10 and 50 years old.
The restrictions are rooted in the belief that the presence of menstruating
women, who some Hindus believe are impure, would distract Lord Ayyappa, the
deity the shrine is dedicated to, because he is celibate.
But in September, the Supreme Court
overturned a 1991 decision by the Kerala High Court, which had upheld the ban.
The Supreme Court ruled 4 to 1 that preventing menstruating women from visiting
the shrine violated the country’s Constitution and was similar to the ostracism
faced by India’s lowest castes, formerly known as “untouchables.”
“This denial denudes them of their right to
worship,” Chief Justice Dipak Misra, who has since retired, wrote in his
opinion.
In a concurring opinion, Judge Dhananjaya Y.
Chandrachud wrote: “To treat women as children of a lesser god is to blink at
the Constitution itself.”
Around Kerala, the ruling brought a wave of
anger, particularly among far-right Hindu nationalists affiliated with India’s
governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which rose to power in 2014 with
the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Members of the B.J.P. and other political
parties have demanded a review of the court’s order. But Kerala’s chief
minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, who accused fringe Hindu groups of backing
Wednesday’s attacks, said the state government would do everything in its power
to uphold the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“Those who want to pray cannot be stopped,”
he said.
For the Times journalists, the problems
started before the trek had even begun. Early Thursday morning, when they
walked toward the starting point, a group of young men asked where they were
going, where they were from, and if the woman, 46, had an identification card.
Later, with cameras from several local
television stations surrounding the journalists, a group of men started
chanting “Go back!” and “Leave!” in Malayalam, a local language, and English.
Along the trek, framed by views of thick
forest and cubbyhole restaurants selling lemon soda and snacks, the intensity
of the attacks grew more acute and better organized. After a bare-chested man,
muttering under his breath and wearing a saffron scarf, a politically charged symbol
for Hinduism, pointed his cellphone camera at the woman, a long line of men
began doing the same, and then they followed her.
Past the halfway point, a larger crowd higher
on the hill started screaming, raising fists in the air and jumping on the
trail’s side railings. When the journalists decided to turn back, the
protesters, apparently emboldened, started chasing them.
Police officers braced for the impact,
swatting the air with wooden batons. Several of them insisted that it was still
safe for the pair to continue, even as they struggled to hold the crowd back.
At one point, a group of men broke through
the clasped hands of the officers, who had formed a ring around the woman, and
threw rocks at her. She was struck on the shoulder but was not wounded.
At the bottom of the hill, heavily armed
officers ushered away the two journalists, who were escorted from the area in a
caged bus.
The police said that no woman had gotten so
close to the temple in more than two decades.
Officers said they were not sure what would
happen in November, when traffic to the temple picks up enormously, and when
pilgrims often wait 10 hours just to start the hike. In previous years, women
under 50 might have gone unnoticed in the crowds, the police said, but this
year, with tensions raised, greater scrutiny is expected.
Still, there were a few small signs of
encouragement. As the female journalist neared the bottom of the trail, an
angry group trailing her, a small man pushed past a police officer, stuck out
his hand and smiled.
“I want to congratulate you,” he said.